A new chapter will begin for me on November 2 when I publish my first collaboration with another writer, a police detective from my home town of Johnson City, Tennessee, named Mark Stout.

The decision to collaborate was not made lightly. It had nothing to do with money, because I would have made at least twice as much money had I written a book alone, as I’ve done thirteen times before.

But I’ve been very fortunate these past few years. We’ve sold more than three million books, and I’ve made more money than I ever thought I would. Why not share some of that good fortune with another writer, someone who has spent his adult life serving the public?

​Mark Stout is a good man, a good husband, a good father, a good cop, and a good writer. He approached me last year and asked me for advice. He’d written a police procedural that revolved around a serial killer. In fact, he’d written two. He asked if I’d read the first one and tell him what I thought.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked that same question by indie writers over the past three years. Usually, I would tell them I just didn’t have time, and I was telling them the truth. I had my own projects to work on. My wife was losing her decade-long battle with breast cancer and required more and more care and attention. I just couldn’t do it.

But something about Mark made me say yes. I could tell he was hungry. I could tell he wanted to learn. And, as I said, he was a good guy.

I took my family to the Cayman Islands in mid-December of last year, and while we were there, I read Mark’s book. He was a rookie author, it was full of errors, but the core of the story had bones. One thing led to another, and eventually, we agreed to tear the book apart and rewrite it together. I hired Charlotte Herscher, an excellent developmental editor with whom I’d worked in the past, and over several months, she helped us get the manuscript in shape. My wife passed away in June, which slowed us down some, but eventually, Mark and I finished the book. It’s called “The Sins of the Mother,” and it turned out well enough that I’m not the least bit ashamed to put my name on it and send it out into the world.

My hope is that Mark and I will write two, maybe three books together over the next couple of years and after that, he’ll be able to move forward successfully on his own. I know it’s asking a lot of you to trust me when I say the book is good, but I hope you will trust me, I hope you’ll read it, enjoy it, and review it well.

In the meantime, as I adjust to life without my soul mate, I’m doing my best to continue to work on other projects. The first book in a new series for Audible Original is nearing completion. (It will be available in ebook and print, too. I’ll tell you more about that soon.) I’ve also decided to collaborate with another writer and hope to help him navigate the rough seas of self-publishing just as I hope to help Mark. A new Dillard book will hit the streets next year. That will be a difficult book to write, because as many of you know, Joe Dillard’s wife, Caroline, was based on my wife, Kristy. I haven’t yet decided how I’ll write it, but I can guarantee you this – it’ll be from the heart.​I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have read my work and who have made me successful in this extremely fickle and competitive profession. Thank you to all of you who reached out to me after Kristy’s passing with thoughtful words and genuine compassion. The collaboration with Mark is my way of paying your kindness and my good fortune forward.

I hope it turns out well. But like I said at the beginning of this blog, either way, life will go on.

This is for John Kane, who told me I need to blog more. I’ll start with the career, which continues to be something akin to a dream come true.

I released a new Darren Street book in February, called “Justice Lost.” It’s done well, as has the entire series. We’ve sold more than 360,000 of the Darren Street series (three books) over the past couple of years. It’s published and marketed by Thomas & Mercer, which is an Amazon publishing company, and they’ve been great to work with. I’m not sure whether I’ll do another Street book. That’ll depend on how much time I have and whether Thomas & Mercer wants me to do another one.

I have a new Dillard book ready to go. It’ll be released May 3, and is called “Due Process.” I like the story, like the book, and I hope readers do, too. I’m nervous about it, as always. As I’ve said before, sending a new book out into the world is like sending one of your children off to college or to a job in another city or state for the first time. You hope you’ve done your best raising them and you hope things turn out well, but you never know for sure. The Dillard series has been tremendously successful, especially for an independently-published author. We’ve sold right at 2.5 million of them now, and the numbers get better each year. I get emails constantly now from other indie authors wanting to know how I’ve managed to achieve the success I’ve achieved. The answer is pretty easy. I’ve written thirteen books now and people have liked them. Having a son who is a marketing genius when it comes to ebook sales and who has studied Amazon like a professional researcher has been a tremendous help. Many of these writers have written one book, maybe two, and they think I can give them the keys to the Kingdom and make them rich. I can’t, but I offer what help I can. I usually just refer them to Dylan, but nobody wants to pay him. I pay him. I pay him a lot, because he’s worth every dime.

I recently signed a contract to write a three-book series for Audible. The protagonist is a woman named Presley Carter, and the series is set in Nashville. They’re talking about getting a well-known actress to record it, which would be tremendously cool as far as I’m concerned. The way my deal with Audible works is that they get to release the Audible book first. They promote it and have exclusive rights for four months. After four months, I’ll publish the ebook and paper editions through our publishing company, Phoenix Flying, LLC, and make it available on Amazon. Dylan will be in charge of the marketing of the ebooks and paper, and I expect that series to go BOOM.

So the career is going great. On the home front, things are fluid. Kristy stopped taking treatments for her breast cancer back in mid-January. They’d basically run out of options and they put her on an old, harsh chemotherapy that almost killed her a couple of times. So she stopped. She’s gained 18 pounds since she stopped the treatment. She isn’t nearly as strong as she once was, but she still has a great sense of humor and a good attitude. I’ve said this many times, but I’ll say it again. I’ve never met anyone as tough as Kristy and I’ve never met anyone with a stronger will to live. She is truly amazing.

My son-in-law, Andy, will graduate from medical school in May. In July, he and my daughter, Kody, and two of my grandchildren, Jonah and Zoey, will move to Cincinnati, Ohio, for six years while Andy goes through his pediatric residency program and a fellowship program that will train him to work in a Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit. He wants to take care of sick babies. I’m extremely proud of him, but it’s going to be very difficult to see them go. They bought a house up there last week. It’s happening, and it’s happening quickly. I love it and I hate it. My oldest son, Jeremiah, recently got a job as a fireman. He’s wanted that for a long time, and I’m so happy for him. His goal is to become a fire chief someday, and I have absolutely no doubt that he’ll do so. He and his wife, Meghan, along with their beautiful, four-year-old daughter, Adley, live in Knoxville, Iowa. They’ll be here this summer, I hope. I can’t wait to see them.

Life is life, right? There’s good and there’s bad, there are ups and there are downs. I’m trying to manage a lot of things right now. Some days it seems like I just can’t do it, but you know what? I can. I’m living and before it’s over, I plan to live even better than I am now. I wish each and every person who reads this a good life. Don’t give in to despair. Don’t give in to self-doubt. Live. Love. Live some more. Love some more. Best wishes from me and mine to you and yours.

It’s been three-and-a-half years since I’ve written a blog. The primary reason I stopped is because I received a comment from a wise-ass. I’m sure he was an unsuccessful writer, and he said something snide that really angered me. So I thought to myself, “I don’t have to do this. I don’t need the aggravation, I don’t need the angst, and I certainly don’t need the anger,” so I stopped blogging.

I’ve regretted it to some degree, largely because I hear from so many kind and wonderful people all the time. I get emails from all over the world now that come into my scottprattfiction.com website, and 99.9 percent of them are genuine and positive and truly uplifting. The people that write them are interested in what’s going on with my life and my writing career, so I thought I’d give folks a bit of an update. It’ll be tough to condense almost four years into one blog, but I’ll try.

As far as my career goes, it’s better than I could have ever expected. We’ve sold more than two million e-book copies of the Joe Dillard series since 2013. We sell a lot of audio books and are selling more and more paper books each month. We’re about to go into hardback sales, which should be interesting, but I’m looking forward to giving it a shot. Last year, between the months of April and September, I stayed in the top 15 bestselling authors on Amazon. We sold a ton of e-books and I made a pile of money, a great deal of which I spent on my wife. Everything just sort of came together. Kindle Direct Publishing promoted the entire Dillard series in April, and then my son, Dylan, who runs the business side of the publishing company, took the momentum we built, learned how to do some different sorts of advertising, built effective campaigns, and the money rolled in. It’s slowed down some now, but we’re still doing very, very well.

I’m also writing for a “traditional” publisher again, although this one is far different than the New York publisher I started with. I’ve written three books for Thomas & Mercer, an Amazon Publishing imprint based in Seattle, Washington. The books are a series about a young lawyer named Darren Street, who is edgier than Joe Dillard. I’ve been very, very hard on Darren. Only one book in the series has been published thus far. It’s called “Justice Redeemed” and went live in November of 2015. The second book, “Justice Burning,” will be published NEXT MONTH, July 11. I finished the first draft of the third book, “Justice Lost,” last month, and am going through the rewriting process now. It will be published in February of 2018. I can’t say enough nice things about Thomas & Mercer. The people there are open and accessible, they care about me, my family and my work, and it has been a genuine pleasure working with them. I plan to write more books in the Darren Street series in the future. We’re working out the details now.

In the meantime, as soon as I finish up this rewrite of “Justice Lost,” I’m going to write another Dillard, the ninth in the series. I have the outline pretty well fleshed out and have been chipping away at it when I’ve been able. We (Dylan and I) plan to release it in October and hope to follow it up with the tenth Dillard next May or June.

So, as you can see, I haven’t been sitting on my hands. I wish I could write faster, but life sometimes gets in the way. My wife, Kristy, who most of you know has been battling breast cancer for ten years and metastatic breast cancer for five years, is doing well right now, but there have been some scary, scary incidents over the past few years. She had to undergo whole brain radiation last February and was basically in bed for about four months. She’s had to endure spinal radiation a couple of times. She is on chemotherapy for the rest of her life, which we hope will be a long, long time. She’s thin as a rail and is tired sometimes, but for the most part, she lives a wonderful life. I’ve never, ever encountered a tougher human being with a more positive attitude, nor have I encountered a person who wants to continue to live more than Kristy does. If you ask her about it, her answer is simple. She’ll tell you, “The people I love the most are here. I want to stay with them.” And she stays, and we love her for it, and we hope she outlasts every one of us.

I mentioned my son, Dylan. He has become a bit of a rock star in the indie publishing marketing world, at least among those who know about him. He’s helped take me to the very top of the indie publishing world by constantly experimenting with marketing strategies and constantly keeping up with the trends in the publishing industry, especially when it comes to Amazon and their mysterious sales algorithm. He’s twenty-eight years old now and knows as much about Amazon and the way their publishing arm works as most of the employees who work there. Dylan also started, along with a young man named Paul Hoilman and couple of other partners, an indoor baseball facility three years ago. Dylan was a tremendous Division 1 college baseball player, so the business, called RBI, is a natural extension of something he’s loved all of his life. It’s doing exceptionally well and I’m proud of his entrepreneurial spirit.

My daughter, Kody, is pregnant with her second child. She was married in December of 2013. Grandson Jonah came along in October of 2015 and granddaughter Zoe will be here in September of this year. Kody’s husband, Andy Rowe, is entering his fourth year of medical school. He plans to become an intensive care pediatrician. Kody is running the dancing school that Kristy used to run. Kristy still goes, but just doesn’t have the energy to handle it full time, and Kody and some other folks have done an incredible job of stepping in and taking it over. It was a natural for Kody. She started dancing when she was two, and wound up earning a dance scholarship to the University of Tennessee, where she was a member of their national championship team back in 2009.

My son, Jeremiah, is a firefighter in Altoona, Iowa, which is just outside of Des Moines. He’s also been a paramedic for years and is very close to getting his degree as a registered nurse. I couldn’t be more proud of him. He and his wife, Meghan, are raising my first grandchild, little Miss Adley Sue Pratt, who is a three-year-old firecracker. They live in Knoxville, Iowa. I wish they weren’t so far away, but we see them as often as we can.

So that’s it, four years in a nutshell. I live in a nicer house than I did back then, drive a nicer car, play golf some, try to stay in shape, and take the garbage out every day. Kristy and I love each other more than the day we were married and we do our best to fight her disease together. The kids, the grandkids, and the rest of the family all do whatever they can to help, and we, in turn, do whatever we can to help them.

And that, I’ve come to learn, is what life has been about. People – friends and families – sharing good times and helping each other through hard times. There is simply nothing like the bonds and the love shared by true friends and close family.​In closing, I feel I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t ask you to check out my new novel, “Justice Burning,” coming from Thomas & Mercer Publishing July 11. If you liked the TV series “Breaking Bad,” you’ll like “Justice Burning.” I take a young man who I hope is an interesting protagonist and send him on a wild ride. I have no idea where that book came from, but I’m glad I wrote it and I hope people like it.

Thank you to all of you who have read and enjoyed the books, to all of you who have reached out with an email (I answer all of them myself) and said kind things about my work, and to all of you who have expressed empathy regarding the situation in which Kristy and I and the family find ourselves. Rest assured, we won’t quit. I wish each and every one of you peace of mind and nothing but the best.

Well, 2013 is in the bag, and it was quite the year for my family and for me.

Things started off badly in January as my wife, Kristy, battled metastatic breast cancer. She went through a round of radiation treatments to her spine that nearly killed her, but she fought through it and began to improve in March and April. In the meantime, her doctor at Vanderbilt put her on a medication regimen that stabilized her blood counts, which had gotten dangerously low. She has done remarkably well and we had a truly special holiday season together.

Back in February, because Kristy was having so much difficulty, our daughter, Kody, moved back home from Knoxville to help Kristy with the dance school. Kody grew up at the school - she took dance from the time she could walk - but she had gone off to college at the University of Tennessee, had graduated, and had gotten a job working for the city of Knoxville. When she came back to the dance school, it was though she had never left. She pitched right in, and by the end of the year (the dance year ends in May) she was practically running the place. She has decided to stay on, thank goodness, and she and Kristy are like a couple of clones. Things are good at The Dance Company, which is what Kristy calls her school. Kody also illustrated a children's book called "There's an Elephant Standing in There" that I wrote a while back, and it turned out beautifully. We're having it formatted now and will put it on the market some time in the next few weeks. I can't wait to see how it does

My son, Dylan, and I formed a corporation called Phoenix Flying, Inc., early in the year and began publishing my books through the company. Dylan had graduated from college a year earlier with a degree in business management and marketing and was working at Verizon. We made him president of the corporation, and in June he left his job and began working with me full time. It was a good decision. Working together, he and I managed to sell more than a quarter of a million ebooks in 2013. We also sold more than a thousand print books and almost two thousand audio books. The money is great, but the feeling of accomplishment is better, as is the satisfaction of being able to work with someone I love, trust and respect. Dylan has since published another writer - a young lady named Rebecca Harris - and will pick up a few more this year, I'm sure. I don't know which direction my career will end up going, although I have no doubt it is going to get better and better. There are people from New York interested in my work now that I've laid a solid foundation and gained a solid following. I can't say much about it right now, but it's all good. We'll see what happens.

In May, Kody's boyfriend, a young man named Andy Rowe, moved back here from Knoxville. He proposed to Kody in July, and then, in October, he got himself admitted to medical school at the Quillen College of Medicine in Johnson City. They were married on December 20th in a beautiful ceremony and then we threw a heck of a party at the Johnson City Country Club for three hundred of our family members and friends. It was a truly beautiful thing, and I'll never forget it.

The day after Kody was married, on December 21, I ate lunch with a group of family at Cheddar's in Johnson City. I left my phone in the car, which is my habit. When I got back to the car, there was a text from my brother telling me that my mother, Shirley Pratt, had died. She had been battling metastatic breast cancer (the same thing Kristy is fighting) for more than a year. I knew the time was near, but it was still a shock. I'm sure my mother is resting in peace. She had come to terms with God, and I can honestly say that I never heard her utter a cross word to another human being. Not even to me, and Lord knows I deserved it more than once.

The year we had is a reminder of something I've learned as time has gone by. Life is going to happen whether you like it or not. Sometimes life happens good, and sometimes life happens bad. You might as well learn to live it.